


An AM Director Looks At Forty

by dollseyes



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, bois being bois, no editing we die like seaside cowboys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22620313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollseyes/pseuds/dollseyes
Summary: Mark does Joan a big favor and the boys have a good time.
Relationships: Joan Bright/Owen Thompson | Agent Green, Mark Bryant & Owen Thompson | Agent Green
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	An AM Director Looks At Forty

“No. Joan, I love you, but there’s no way in hell.”

“Please Mark, I’m swamped. I promise you if there was another option, I would take it.”

“It’s a Saturday, Joanie! First of all, I might have plans! Second of all, you shouldn’t have to work on a Saturday. I think that’s like a war crime.”

“Mark, this is important.”

Mark let out a long groan. Which really just dug his grave for him. Because Joanie knew when she had him beat.

“Thank you. Don’t forget to pick up the surprise beforehand.”

“How could I forget?”

Mark hated his life. Every part of it had brought him here, to the lowest point he had ever reached, pulling in front of his sister’s house in David Michael’ minivan. In the back, Elijah Hayes and David sat in matching floral Hawaiian shirts with similar motifs. David’s was covered in flamingos, Elijah’s in toucans. Worst of all, somehow they had bullied Mark into a cockatoo print. The van rocked with the force of Elijah’s excited bouncing. He had been given the honor of holding the parrot themed Hawaiian shirt for the man of the hour.

As soon as the car was in park, the other two jumped out like excited children and started walking towards the door. Mark followed after, pulling the keys until Elijah shouted back at him.

“Leave it on! We need the full effect!”

“That will absolutely kill the battery,” Mark responded.   
“It’ll be fine. It’s been through a whole lot worse! And even if it does kill the battery, it doesn’t matter because we’re getting rid of it next week anyway. It’s lived a good life.” David called. Mark truly believed that the monstrosity he had driven there had been carting around football players and teen girls for the past fifteen years. To be quite frank, he wasn’t sure how it was still road-worthy. But it was the only one that would fit them and also be able to handle the extra weight on the back.

Not for the first or last time that day, Mark groaned, but did as he was instructed. He left the keys in the van as they made their way up the short walk to the front door. His hands shoved as deep in his pockets, as though that would erase the abomination of his shirt. Maybe he could just disappear into the cargo pants he had been forced into. The pockets were certainly deep enough. And there was an excess of them. What else could he put in there? His dignity and pride had already been tucked into them and there was still space.

Elijah rang the bell and waited, bouncing on his toes.

They heard shuffling on the other side of the door, and it opened to reveal Owen Green, Co-Director of the AM and Mark’s brother-in-law. He was in a white button down and very practical khakis. Mark briefly pondered if this was as “casual” as Green could get.

“Happy Birthday!” Elijah and David shouted in unison.

His brows furrowed in confusion.

“My birthday is in December…” he protested.

“It’s a belated gift,” a voice from behind him said as Joan ducked under his arm to stand at his side.

Owen looked down at her, the confusion not fading from his face.

“But we have quarterly reviews to do.”

“No, I have quartlies to do. You have a concert to attend.”

Mark didn’t know that Green’s eyes could open that wide.

“You didn’t.”

Joan smiled.

“We wanted to surprise you.”

“Joan said you’ve always wanted to go, and when she said she couldn’t go, I volunteered to come along. I’m a bit of a Parrothead myself,” David offered.

Mark thought that was rather modest of him. David had been the expert, having already attended an event like this a time or two. He had given both Mark and Elijah a rundown of what a concert was like, from the tailgating to the chants, to the dances. Mark had already had a vague familiarity with it, and he did know an embarrassing number of the songs already. Elijah had soaked it up like a sponge. At this point, Mark wondered if he didn’t know the songs better than David did.

“Consider me surprised,” Owen said, a grin spreading across his face.

Mark had long ago suppressed the urge to gag every time he watched his sister kiss her husband, but these were new circumstances and he felt the bile rising up in his throat.

Green turned back to the others.

“But I don’t have anything to wear.”

Taking his cue, Elijah thrust the brightly colored shirt at him.

“I also bought you some shorts,” Joan offered.

“But I could have sworn I own shorts-”

“No, you don’t. I looked through your entire closet and there wasn’t one pair. Here,” she handed him a shopping bag from the entryway closet.

Owen disappeared back into the house and Joan invited them inside.

“I’m so glad you had this idea, Joan. I’ve wanted to go again for a while now,” David started excitedly. “And it gave me an excuse to convert Elijah here.”

The force with which David patted the doctor on the back was the practiced slap on the back trained for a son who plays football and a daughter who was unnaturally strong. Elijah rocked forward hard. Which led to David apologizing profusely. That kept the two of them entertained until Green reappeared.

He was in his shorts and parrot shirt. The ensemble really brought out how pale he was. Mark didn’t think he had seen that much white skin in his life. Which was awful enough, but then as it turned out, David had his own surprises. Mark didn’t know how they had slipped past him.

David handed Owen an eyepatch, a pirate hat and a pair of flip flops.

“Look here, they have a bottle opener in the heel.”

David showed off the feature and Owen grinned.

Joan seemed to be enjoying the whole thing and Mark wondered if his sister didn’t fabricate situations with the sole intention of feeding off his pain.

“Let’s get a picture,” she said, pulling her phone from her pocket.

“I can take it,” Mark offered.

“No, you need to be in it.”

“I am literally a photographer Joanie.”

“I don’t care, get in.”

He wished he could say that his sister had only become bossy when she became co-Director, but he distinctly remembered her dictating the games they played as a child.

He found himself pulled against David, with Green sandwiched between David and Elijah. The camera flashed in his eyes and he shuddered. He preferred to be on the other side of the lens, whenever possible. He had brought one of his cameras so that he could document the evening, but it was sitting on the floor of the passenger seat of the van that was still running out front.

“Okay, it’s probably time for us to head out,” he offered.

Elijah led the procession outside and Mark took up the rear, which gave him a perfect view of Green’s reaction.

Attached to the trailer hitch of the van was the gaudiest thing Mark had ever seen. David and Elijah, with the help of their children, had mounted a boat that they had bought with Owen about a year and a half ago. The original project had been to refurbish an old skip they had bought off Craigslist on a whim. They had gotten it as seaworthy as they could and then taken it out to the Michaels’ lakehouse for its maiden voyage. Mark had gotten the pleasure of witnessing the chaos of it filling with water on the lake from the safety of the dock with his sister. The last he had seen it, it was resting on the sand, filled up like a bathtub. As it turned out, it was only waterproof in one direction.

The three shipwrights had just collectively shrugged and moved on, and Mark had hoped that was the last time he would see that stupid wooden boat. Unfortunately, when Sam dropped him off at the Michaels to pick up the van, it was there, on a trailer attached to the van.

A banner strung between two fishing poles read, “A Pirate Looks At 40” in bright red text. Mark recognized the new floral pattern painted on the side of the boat as both Chloe and Frank’s handiwork. This really had turned out to be a team effort.

Owen stared in shock at it.

“You fixed the boat.”

“We did more than fix it!” Elijah said with a grin too big to fit on his face. “We fitted it with a bar and a blender and a cooler, all hooked up to the power.”

“We’ll have the best setup at the tailgate,” David said with unadulterated pride in his voice.

Green quietly nodded along, but the grin didn’t slip from his face.

They were, as David predicted, the envy of the tailgate. Elijah whipped out his hitherto unknown bartending skills. The blender never seemed to pause and it seemed that they had brought enough tequila to make a margarita for every person in the lot. Green drank one margarita and moved to just tequila on the rocks, which he drank at a rate that was alarming to Mark. Mark, despite being completely sober, wondered as to whether or not he could get drunk off of fumes alone.

When he tried to bring it up with Elijah Hayes, an actual medical doctor, the other man decided to stick his nose directly over a glass of rum and inhale deeply before promptly forgetting what the purpose of the experiment was and simply drinking the rum.

At some point, Mark discovered David generously applying sunscreen to Green’s face, leaving globs along his cheeks and nose.

“Your skin will burn to a crisp if you don’t put it on.”

Green had become somewhat of a ragdoll, and allowed himself to be pulled around. Mark intervened on his behalf, and took it upon himself to actually spread out the lotion. He also made certain to rub some onto the back of his neck, which was already looking quite pink. As much as he disliked him, he didn’t wish to bring home a lobster red Owen to his sister.

“Thank you,” Owen said, too softly.

“Yeah, don’t mention it.”

Elijah appeared in front of them, and Mark wondered if he wasn’t a Russian spy with the way he could just appear and disappear at will. This time, he was holding a tray full of what looked like shrimp and a bowl of cocktail sauce.

“Owen, we got you shrimp.”

“I-”

“It’s fake shrimp!” David called from somewhere in the crowd.

Owen took one hesitantly and took a bite of it. His face scrunched up, but he put the rest of the not shrimp into his mouth and then took another. Out of pure curiosity, Mark tried one. He wouldn’t have been surprised if someone told him the shrimp were made of rubber. As soon as David’s attention was turned back on Owen, Mark took a cocktail napkin and spat the masticated shrimp into it and tucked it into his pocket for lack of a better place to put it. He would throw it out later.

The concert itself was also chaotic, and Mark remembered it in war flashbacks, a series of events whose order made no difference and while every event was connected by some common thread, they were tangled beyond recognition.

At some point during the concert he had:

  1. Shouted “SALT SALT SALT” at the top of his lungs
  2. Joined a conga line
  3. Replaced his shirt with a coconut bra (which Owen had somehow procured)
  4. Lifted Owen to crowdsurf
  5. Comforted three crying men so drunk they couldn’t remember that they had seen their wives earlier that morning to the sound of “Come Monday”
  6. Stood in as a Joan replacement for a slow dance to “A Pirate Looks at 40”
  7. Suffered exactly 76 instances of Owen Green referring to Jimmy Buffett as “James William Buffett”



Needless to say, he was relieved when the seaside cowboy announced the last song and the end was finally in sight.

The walk back to the van was slow and laborious as he dragged the other three behind him. The ordeal made him reconsider his stance on toddler leashes. It had to be a similar situation and he would gladly give his left arm to have any control over the three of them.

It was a relief when he finally had them in the car, buckling them in himself because not one of them could be trusted to do it themselves. Elijah kept unbuckling himself and climbing around the car until Mark let him take the middle seat next to David.

When everyone was settled, Mark sat in the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. Or he tried to turn on the ignition, only to have it sputter back on.

“You have to turn the key,” David offered from the back seat.

“I am turning the key!” 

“But you have to turn it like all the way.”

“I am turning the key as far as it will go.”

“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” Owen slurred.

Mark shot him a glare. “No, how silly of me.”

“I think the battery is dead,” Elijah called.

“No shit,” Mark said, failing to keep his frustration from his voice. He didn’t mean to snap at them, but it had been a long day.

He popped the hood and went to check underneath. A really pointless gesture because he knew the problem already. The battery was fried. It had been the reason David was planning on getting rid of the van. So this was rather just the icing on top of the cake for the evening.

The blue Subaru Ascent pulled into the lot and Mark watched Adam roll down the window.

“Your ride is here.”

Then he looked at the passenger seat.

_ Fuck _ .

When Elijah said that Adam was out and about and could come pick them up, Mark had forgotten the fact that when Adam was out and about, there was a very high likelihood that Caleb was with him. As soon as that realization dawned on him, he felt every drink that the other three had consumed flood into his bloodstream.

Adam didn’t love loading his father, his boyfriend’s father, his boyfriend’s former therapist’s husband, and his boyfriend’s former therapist’s brother into the car all while his boyfriend got empath drunk with the additional complication of an endless feedback loop.

He had seen the realization dawn in Mark’s eyes right before Mark had lost all real control.

“It’s all your problem now, bud,” he had said.

Adam hadn’t really realized the implications of that statement at the time, but now, driving down the interstate and listening to his father and David Michaels slur two different Jimmy Buffett songs at the top of their lungs in the middle seat, as Owen Green told Mark Bryant how much he loved his sister while Mark told him how happy he was to see his sister happily in a relationship, and Caleb telling him how much he “was totally just fucking in love with Adam” and had missed him while they were away at college, he really understood what Mark had meant.

“Pull over,” his father called.

“What? Why? We’re like twenty minutes away!”

“Pull over, boychick!”

Adam pulled off to the side of the road so his father could climb out of the car, which prompted David Michaels to climb out of the car thus starting a chain reaction which led to no one being in the car.

His father’s reason for wanting to get out of the car? To give Adam a hug and tell him how proud he was of him. Which was nice, but Adam was tired and not in the mood. But then Mr Michaels had to express his pride of Caleb and on and on, until Adam finally got everyone loaded back into the car, this time with his father in the passenger seat, and Caleb and David in the middle.

Mark finally came back to full awareness on his sister’s couch, with a glass of water in his hand and Green’s head in his lap, passed out.

“So it went well?” Joan asked, arms crossed and a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.

“Good.”

“Oh, but we had to leave the van and the boat trailer in the parking lot.”

“That’s fine, Helen called a tow truck for the car to get it sold for parts and Rebecca arranged to get the boat taken to the dump.”

“You killed a lot of birds with one stone this weekend.”

Joan shrugged.

“I’m good at what I do. Did you have fun though?”

Did he have fun? He had babysat three grown men for an entire day and wasn’t allowed to have a drop of alcohol. He had eaten awful fake shrimp and slow danced with his brother in law and listened to David and Elijah tell each other how much they loved each other with a sickening amount of sweetness and listened to Jimmy Buffet music.

“Yeah, that was the most fun I’ve had in awhile.”

**Author's Note:**

> I regret everything and nothing. For the TBS discord.


End file.
